


Living Any Other Way

by waitforhightide



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Animal Death, Betrayal, Canon Compliant, Dogs, Flashbacks, Heavy Angst, Hindu James Potter, Mental Breakdown, Mental Health Issues, Mentally Ill Remus Lupin, Other, POC James Potter, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Service Dogs, Suicidal Thoughts, Violence against objects, War Veteran Remus Lupin, animal adoption, animal companion
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-04-16
Updated: 2018-04-16
Packaged: 2019-04-23 15:12:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 9,049
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14335194
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/waitforhightide/pseuds/waitforhightide
Summary: November, 1981: Remus Lupin gets a phone call from the animal shelter where he and Si—he andthat manhad put in interest for adopting a dog, and he can’t bear the thought of leaving it to be put down.





	1. In The Thin, Cold Light of Dawn

**Author's Note:**

> Ever grateful for [dolarhyding](https://archiveofourown.org/users/dolarhyding) for beta-reading and [MisforMoony](https://archiveofourown.com/users/MisforMoony/pseuds/MisforMoony) for listening to me plan and troubleshoot this fic, even though it scared em and is so langsthy (lengthy + angsty). I do not have PTSD personally but I consulted with friends who do and did my best to make things as accurate and not assholeish as possible.
> 
> Any errors depicting either PTSD or Hinduism are entirely mine; PLEASE feel free to shoot me a correction in comments if I screwed something up!

_"Before you get a dog, you can't quite imagine what living with one might be like;  
a_ _fterward, you can't imagine living any other way."_   
-  Caroline Knapp

 

The day he finds the dog, Remus is planning to kill himself.

It isn’t really a dramatic plan; theatrics and aesthetics are more Si—more _ other people’s  _ style. It’s more of a retirement after a gradual wearing-out, like throwing out a pair of old shoes or replacing the carpet where it’s been trodden upon for too long. 

Blood purists would probably blame his lycanthropy. They would tout his failing will to live as a fatal flaw in his biological programming, and one of the reasons he should have died at six rather than live to be an aberration.

A more sympathetic observer may have said that his slow and measured undoing had started with the Potters’ funeral, a quiet, Order-run affair at the tiny church in Godric’s Hollow so as to not attract unnecessary Death Eater attention. Their Dark Lord may be gone—and because of Harry, that tiny laughing thing who had drooled on Remus’s shirt not ten days before!—but their desire for revenge is not. In any case, the funeral was quiet, and everyone was Polyjuiced into Muggles and Transfigured into no one at all, and Remus found himself having to speak about them both, Lily  _ and _ James, because Lily’s older sister was still as a statue. She was not Transfigured, except by the profound and shocked grief etched into her face. Remus wondered, in that floating, detached way his thoughts had those days, if she’d even known there was a war on before Lily had died. He also wondered where Sirius Orion Black was celebrating his twenty-second birthday. Then he drank Firewhiskey next to Alastor Moody and Benjy Fenwick and Albus fucking Dumbledore until he didn’t wonder anything at all.

Members from either group may also have said it had begun at Sirius’s sentencing, two days past the funeral. There was no trial, and so also no last image of his lover being taken away in chains, but Remus had heard the rumors of his laughter ringing into the night as he rejoiced in the murder of three of his best friends. Remus wondered then, also in that soft and disconnected way, why he had been spared. Was it easier? Did returning to Remus’s small flat—one that Sirius had helped pay for, one where Sirius had lived more often than not since moving out of that crappy flat he’d rented seventh year—throw off Sirius’s plans? Or did Siri— _ Black,  _ did  _ Black _ just know that the torture of being left alone would hurt Remus most? That the only thing possibly worse than being confronted by his lying, killing, Death Eater of a lover would be never having resolution at all? Or is it just that Remus Lupin, poor werewolf with no family to speak of now that wartime bonds were breaking into peacetime celebrations, simply didn’t matter enough to kill, because he would just die with his guts cut open in a forest in northern Canada or Iceland someday, and no one was left to notice?

In the end it hardly matters, because he truth is that the unraveling does not begin until the first full moon after everyone is gone.  _ Gone _ , that’s such a nicer word than  _ dead. Dead  _ makes him think of rot and worms and dirt, while  _ gone _ seems… cleaner. Not that his life has been clean for a long time. Some things, like one’s bones turning backwards and one’s internal organs reassembling in one’s abdomen every twenty-nine days are, by definition, filthy.

The week before November’s moon he checks every single space in the flat he can, but there is not a bottle of Wolfsbane to be found. He tries to remember when Lily last brewed it, but instead can only remember the look of her too-pale face and too-red hair spread out on a silk pillow that was probably made of plastic or wood because who needs neck support when you’re  _ dead, _ right? Of course, James comes into his head right after, and the way his body rested in the coffin even though Fleamont would have probably wanted it cremated in the Hindu way, but Sirius was the one who had those details written down and notarized by a goblin at Gringotts, transcribed on thick, wax-sealed parchment. The scroll probably sat atop a mound of Alphard Black’s inherited gold in Sirius’s Gringott’s vault. Because even when they all confronted their own mortality sometime in 1979, they never thought they’d all go. Not at once. Not like this. Remus isn’t anything to James and Lily, not officially, so he had no say in the funeral arrangements. At least they had dressed James in white, and Lily in that beautiful blue dress… 

On the day of the full moon, Remus brings lilies (for James) and sunflowers (for Lily) to their headstone. It is the first time he’s left home since the funeral, and it makes him tense and worried. Every noise makes him jump, his head whips around to follow every passing bird. Before he leaves, he lights a bowl of enchanted fire that will burn for thirty days.

“I’m bollocks at religion,” he mumbles awkwardly, not even sure if he should bother speaking out loud. “I wish—I’m sorry I didn’t pay more attention. When your parents passed. But I hear in Hinduism you’re supposed to hold vigil at a fire ten days after the funeral, and, well, you know. I can’t stay. But the fire will.”

After that he Apparates to one of the remote forests he knows from his missions in the Order. The odds of him attacking a human here are slim, but he was certain Greyback and Bronze-eye would have broken ranks and fled from in the wake of Voldemort’s death. When he slips into the wolf there is pain and brightness and no grief, and  he is glad.

It isn’t until he wakes up that things crumble.

The thin, cold light of dawn always makes things colorless before it paints them golden. Nothing is immune from the softness except the pulses of pain in his body and the bright red blood spattered across the grass, blurred by its proximity to his face as he squints, trying to focus the world. In his life as a monster, he has spent nights chained to cellar walls, slashing at himself in broken and haunted houses, and at the request of Dumbledore he’s even turned to other werewolves to wrestle and tear the need to bite out of his mouth until sunrise, just to gain wartime trust; but not once has he awoken to the knowledge that he is completely alone. There has always been someone: his mother, Poppy Pomfery, the Marauders, or the homeless and roving werewolves whose names he sometimes didn’t know but whose comraderie somehow made things bearable, The morning of November 12, 1981, Remus lies intensely alone for the first time in years,  in a Polish forest feeling as monochromatic and pale as the early morning, and with this knowledge and the quiet observation of the peace around him, he decides he wants to die.

This is not a new thought. Depression has always been a close companion to Remus, closer than his friends, closer even than—well. But for the first time, he wants to die and is adult enough to follow through with it. To put his affairs in order, so to speak. He lies on the damp, frosted ground, shivering and waiting for the feeling to pass as it so often does. He tries to distract himself, but all that comes to mind is thoughts of animal companions, war objectives that no longer matter, and the small baby he fed only a few weeks ago who somehow saved everyone in the world except Remus’s four best friends. 

When his teeth start chattering and the feeling of a large and empty void opening before him does not leave, he gives a great, heaving sigh and gets to his feet, trying to ignore the smell of blood and find the enchanted tree where he had stashed his wand and clothes.   
  


The resigned and foggy feeling does not fade that day, or the day after, or the day after that. By the quarter moon, Remus has made up his mind and has begun, quietly, to gather the detritus of his thin and faded life into neat boxes and twine-bound papers so that, when they owled his father, he could simply vanish it all away if he’d like. Remus has not spoken to Lyall in three years, partly due to the sense of imposition he always felt after Hope had died, and mostly because the last conversation they’d had, shortly after Remus’s Hogwarts graduation, Lyall had implied that, perhaps, if Voldemort was  _ offering, _ Remus might seek out the better life all these skull-mask blokes were talking about.

No, it’s much better for things to be packaged and charmed to be opened by their intended recipients so that Lyall could not sort through Remus’s personal life after it had ended, and the few things Remus still finds important can be given to his acquaintances in the Order.

Interrupting his thoughts, the telephone rings. In the dim quiet of the flat, Remus jumps and yelps so loudly that his first thought, before he can stop it, is that he’s worried he’ll wake Pad—Siri—

_ “Fuck!” _ he shouts, mostly to calm his nerves but also, in part, because he has stubbed his toe on the corner of one of his boxes in his attempt to maneuver around the coffee table. His heart pounds in his ears as he fumbles over the cracked linoleum countertop for the once-white phone on the wall, and for a moment he can’t hear whoever is on the other end. He is trembling from the startle. “Hullo, er, this is Remus Lupin, please—give me a—a moment, sorry.” He manages to put his feet on the same side of the counter as the phone and takes a deep, shaky breath. “Sorry, yes, you’ve got me now, sorry.”

“That’s alright, Remus, hi!” The voice is cheerful and familiar, but Remus can’t place it through the brain fog. “This is Ashley from the animal shelter in Walworth. I’m calling about your friend!”

A succession of thoughts again:  _ Padfoot, what did you— No, gone, he’s— She doesn’t know, no Muggle knows I love a murderer—  _

“I—Ashley, I’m sorry, I’ve—Things have been a bit complicated here and I’m not sure I’m following you. Can you start again? Slower?”

She laughs, and suddenly Remus  _ does  _ remember her. A week or so before Halloween, he and—and—well,  _ he _ had found a dog in the alley next to their flat, matted with dirt and digging into the trash. Even under the grime, the resemblance to Padfoot was unmistakable; but where Padfoot was a joyful romper, this poor creature was more of a Grim, all bared teeth and fear. He had been coaxed out reluctantly, and had been brought to the shelter, where they told the kind, smiling girl behind the counter that if she could not find a home for him— 

“You told me that—” she begins.

“That we—that  _ I _ might want to adopt him, yes. Ashley, I’m sorry, I—things have changed, I can’t—”

“Our buddy needs somewhere to stay. It would only be a short time, if you like,” Ashley interrupts hopefully. “He’s feeling much better, and we’ve just got a bunch of poor babies from a puppy mill up Bedford way. He’s so big, and he just scares the living daylights out of them. He just needs a place to, you know, lie low for a bit. Until someone can take him.” She pauses, probably to allow him to reply, and when he stays silent, she says, “If we can’t place him in a foster by Friday, he’ll be put down.” Remus hears genuine sadness in her voice, and his brain skips uncomfortably over the crazed mugshot of Black in the  _ Daily Prophet _ and the constant numb feeling in his chest like a Dementor and Padfoot shivering in a stone cell and that image of James in his coffin,  _ put down. _

He glances around helplessly at his flat, the worn boxes already half-filled with jumpers and books and the record collection he’d meant to give to Molly Prewett’s husband, Arthur.  _ Well, _ he thinks heavily.  _ At least there’s no longer shite on the floor. _

“Only for a short while,” Remus warns Ashley, who squeals with delight on the other end of the phone. Remus double-checks the moon phase calendar out of habit, even though he knows the next date. “Say, what, three weeks? Until ninth December. That’s a Wednesday.”

“I’m sure  _ someone  _ will want him as a Christmas present,” Ashley agrees. Remus is too tired to read into her emphasis. He agrees to be home (as if there was anywhere else to be, now that his friends were all dead or in prison) the next day so Ashley can bring the mutt by. He can’t very well take the tube with a dog, and he realizes in a belated sort of way that he never got around to trying to buy a car. There was always something more important to do when there was a war on.

When he hangs up the phone with a sigh, he regards the boxes again and eventually moves them, slowly, like a man underwater, until they are stacked neatly against the wall.

He is not changing his mind, he tells himself. He’s only delaying the inevitable.   
  


* * *

 

The dog is healthier-looking than Remus remembers, probably due to the dependable food, warm kennel, and vigorous brushing the staff have given him, and his resemblance to Padfoot is now even stronger. For a moment after Ashley brings him through the front door, Remus’s guts twist, and he thinks he may be sick. Then his mind, always trying for the rational and balanced, begins taking inventory.

_ Smaller than Padfoot. More wiry fur. Dark eyes. Some scars on his flanks where some other stray probably bit him. _

He tries his best to shake off the feeling of being haunted as he approaches the dog slowly and gets onto one knee, hand held out. The dog sniffs him warily for a moment and whines, and Remus thinks perhaps the dog will be too afraid of him, but the whine turns into a short, sharp yip and his tail starts wagging, a black fan making small  _ thup-thup-thup _ sounds on the wood floor. 

“I think he likes you!” Ashley says.

“Well, that’s good, seeing as we’re about to be flatmates.” Remus means for this to be sarcastic, but somehow it doesn’t sound that way.

The dog allows Remus to pet him, and lies calmly and comfortably on the floor as Remus does paperwork with Ashley on his cracked kitchen countertop. He has not moved any of his boxes, only pulled a jumper haphazardly from a box in the middle of a stack, causing the one above it to shift crookedly, but Ashley seems not to notice. She leaves him a collar, a leash, a bag of food, and her card in case there are any problems and a promise to call before 9th December.

“If you change your mind,” she says with a smile that speaks volumes. “You can always adopt him yourself.”

_ Well, you see, it’s quite difficult to own a dog and kill yourself at the same ti—  _

“Thank you,” Remus said. “But really, I won’t.” He looks at the dog again as Ashley leaves, and she is halfway down the corridor before Remus realized he’d forgotten something important.

“Hey—Ashley! What—what’s his name?”

She was still smiling that all-knowing smile. “He hasn’t got one,” she said. “That’s on you.”   
  


* * *

 

 

The Dog, who had acquired capital-letter status sometime before supper, seems calmer than he had in the shelter. The boisterous energy Ashley had spoken of seems to appear mostly on walks, which The Dog wants to take frequently; and around new dogs or people, a status which Remus seems to lose quite quickly. The first few days are a blur of basic canine things—finding good walk routes, trying not to get his shoulder wrenched by excited bird chasing, teaching The Dog where the food is, figuring out which whine or bark or nose bop meant The Dog needs more food or another walk or just wants to chew on something other than an old slipper which is not Remus’s, and which Remus deliberately allows The Dog to keep. 

The first night, The Dog sleeps on the small armchair, seemingly exhausted by the excitement of his move. On the second night, Remus wakes to use the bathroom and finds The Dog asleep in the small hallway outside the flat’s single bedroom, where the door is resolutely closed. “Hey, you,” he says sleepily, eyes squinted mostly shut. “D’you want a pillow or something?”

Remus knows The Dog is only responding to the tone of his voice, but the small, happy growl and the thump of his tail feels good all the same. When Remus tugs an overlarge throw pillow out of the sitting room and into the hallway, The Dog steps onto it, makes his requisite circles dictated by whatever doggy impulse drives him, and lays down with a satisfied snort. He is still there when Remus awakes the next morning.

On the third night, the dreams that exhaustion has been keeping at bay come back in earnest. From the moment he falls asleep on the couch, Remus is pulled roughly into tangles of dark and confusing nightmares from which he cannot escape or even remember properly. He tosses and turns, trying to wake and failing. In his dreams he sees his friends, and that is enough to make them horrible.

Sometime around dawn he swims, mentally gasping and emotionally exhausted, into wakefulness with the help of a wet, warm tongue on his cheek.

“God, fuck, gerroff me Padfoot, you know I hate it when you—”

As he breaks through the surface of his sleep, two things become clear at once: one, the weight of warm dog on his lap is staying a dog, and does not shift into the laughing, glowing profile of his boyfriend; and two, this is because The Dog is not Padfoot. Padfoot is gone. The Dog is just a dog.

Remus shoves himself roughly off of the couch and goes straight to the bathroom, the only place with a door that closes that isn’t the bedroom, and he closes it too hard, falls against the wall, and slides to the floor. It isn’t a conscious decision, only a reaction as his knees giving way beneath him. The Dog, concerned, scratches briefly at the door, but Remus does not hear him. There is a strange sound blocking the noises from outside, and it takes him an inordinate amount of time to realize that the sound is coming from him, and he is somewhere between choking and crying. He has heard these sounds—these broken, desperate, uncontrollable chords of grief—many times since leaving school and falling into a war, but they have never come from him. He has heard people grieve out loud a hundred times, and he has never thought of how much it hurt. How it physically  _ hurts.  _ Each sob seems to make it harder to breathe, filling the space in his chest with wet cement as he fights to be able to inhale. His pulse pounds in his chest and each beat tears something loose to tangle in his throat. When he stands up, his vision turns silver-white at the edges. His hands grip white-knuckled and desperate at the edges of the sink and he makes the mistake of looking in the mirror.

There is gray hair at his temples and there are lines in his face other than the scars that have made a map of nights spent in mania and pain. His eyes are wide and lifeless, some integral spark that has driven him having died in Godric’s Hollow with James and Lily, or been blasted off the face of the Earth with Peter, or been dragged in chains to the middle of the ocean to rot with Sirius. Sirius Black, who is in Azkaban. Sirius Black, world-class schoolboy prankster. Sirius Black, with the laugh that fills a room. Who loves loudly and enormously and hates with the passion of Fiendfyre. Sirius Black, who, for ten years, had said he would rather die than turn his back on his friends. Who had gone out to Hogsmeade the moment he turned seventeen and gotten a Wizarding tattoo across his chest of a real-time phasing moon nested in huge, strong antlers and protected by a fierce rat.

Sirius Black, who probably turned in his spiritual brother, the father of his godson, to the most dangerous wizard who had ever fucking lived, with a smile. Who was able to make Remus feel that enormous love so deeply that it blocked out the rest.

Sirius Black, who killed two of the best wizards he had ever known, with a word and a curse and that laughter.

Remus’s sobs become screams, and the mirror shatters. He cannot feel his hands and cannot tell if he broke the glass with magic or not. His magic has not been involuntary since before he was bitten, but fuck, it might be now, here in this world where everything is wrong and everything hurts. He screams until his throat is raw, until he tastes blood in his mouth, and he relishes in the feeling of bleeding while he is human. For the first time since he learned the Potters were dead and Harry was somewhere else, he feels something. It writhes inside his chest and slams against his sternum like a madman. His hands are, for once, his own as they cause destruction, bare of the wolf that allows him to destroy. He is human as he tears down the medicine cabinet, the shower curtain, as he sweeps the toothbrushes—one for him and one for the mouth of a killer—off the top of the sink. He is human as he punches the wall, breaks through the gypsum, tries again beneath the window and meets cement with shifting knuckles. He swings again, again, again. The faucet is crooked in the sink and there is a ragged hole in the thin particle board of the fake wooden door. His hands are swollen. There is glass in his feet. His face is stinging, as if cut, and he glances towards the mirror to check but he can’t, it’s broken, he shattered it,   _ haha—  _

There is something wet on the bottom of his fingers. It is too cool to be his blood. He turns and sees a pink tongue and  black fur poking through the ragged hole in the door. It is ( _ Padfoot! PADFOOT!  _ his mind clamors. _ ) _ The Dog. Through the high, sharp ringing in his ears, Remus hears The Dog whining. He glances around at the broken glass, sees a small line of blood seeping under the door, wonders how long The Dog has been outside the door, worrying. 

Remus crouches down, wincing, breathing hard and swaying unsteadily, until he can see out the hole in the door. The adrenaline is flowing out of him now, making his muscles feel like jelly and his mouth taste like metal. The Dog is sitting by the door, looking vaguely guilty, half a meter from a puddle on the hardwood.  _ The poor bloke, _ Remus thinks.  _ Woke me to go out and ended up trying to nurse my wounds through a door. _

“Hang on,” Remus says, his voice small and strangled in his torn throat. “Hang on, boy, it’s okay, just give me a minute…” The Dog whines again and then there is a soft  _ thump _ as he lays down in front of the door.  _ Such a solid weight, dogs, _ Remus thinks disjointedly. He glances around for his wand and realizes he’s left it on the coffee table at his makeshift bedside. The devastation he had relished in moments before now seemed impossibly  _ inconvenient. _ His bare feet bleed freely, and he doesn’t like to think of the shards of mirror he’ll have to coax out of them later; there is no way to let The Dog in until it’s cleared up.

A sense of purpose—of  _ realness _ —settles into his limbs as he sets about trying to liberate his feet of their small, silver attackers and tackles the prodigious task of straightening the washroom. It’s not so much the physical work, but the process; the order of it all. Each task has an end, and each end leads to another start. It’s a cycle, like everything else, but this cycle has a purpose, and an end. All the things he’s done since James and Peter and Lily had died has seemed reflexive, almost programmed into him. This is different. Everything seems brighter: the light from the small bathroom window, the red footprints on the tile, the smell of soap from the jar he had knocked over. He hears The Dog bark impatiently outside and hopes The Dog will forgive him for his chaos. After almost an hour, Remus has the glass swept into the wastebasket with the worn-out towel they used as a bathmat and has wiped down the tile with hot water and hand soap. He needs to bleach it, and maybe spend some time with a wand in the grout, but there can be no harsh chemicals until he’s gotten his shoes on. He puts the whole basket into the sink, wanting it as far from The Dog as possible, and, feet haphazardly covered in Band-Aids, opens the door enough to slip out into the hall.

The Dog has fallen asleep on the pillow Remus left in the corridor, but as he hears the door creak, he lifts his head up excitedly. Upon seeing Remus, his long black tail  _ thump-thump-thumps _ against the floor faster than ever, and he lets out a quiet bark, as if he is excited but doesn’t want to frighten the human who is finally out of the small room.

“Hi, there,” Remus says softly. He glances at the puddle and The Dog whines and presses his ears flat against his head. “No, no, it’s alright, shh,” Remus assures him, leaning down and scratching the fur on the top of his head and behind his ears. “Not your fault, you great furball, that’s all me.”  To demonstrate he goes to the kitchen and finds the paper towels and rubber gloves, and with a little bleach solution all’s right with the world again. He supposes he could have done it by magic, but there is something he needs about the smell of cleaning products and the liquid shine of the floor, and The Dog is a Muggle dog; he understands cleaning up with your hands and a spray bottle. The Dog stays back near the sitting room as Remus mucks about in the kitchen, but when Remus strips off the rubber gloves and refills The Dog’s water bowl, The Dog goes to sniff at Remus’s feet, looking both hopeful and worried. Remus makes his way gingerly to the couch, where he sits with his wand and does his best to  _ Episky _ the cuts away and vanish the bandages so The Dog can’t dig them out of the wastebasket and chew on them. When he’s done all he feels he can do, Remus puts on his worn slippers and flops, drained, onto the sofa. The Dog, encouraged by Remus’s sudden movement, comes in and jumps up to join him. He licks tentatively at Remus’s arm and then, encouraged, lays beside him and rests his head on Remus’s chest, which, despite his knowledge of The Dog being just a dog, twinges with helpless joy for just a second.

“I’m sorry about that, friend,” Remus says, petting The Dog’s head with his still-swollen hands. His voice is thick and cracked and uncertain. “I’m so sorry.” 

They lay in silence for a while, The Dog in his happy canine resting space and Remus drifting in and out of dreamless, adrenaline-fatigued sleep. Sometime in the afternoon, the November sunlight catches the doodles of wand-scratches and leftover ink that have accumulated on the old coffee table over the years—has it been? Has it really been years now? —and among them are the star maps Sir—the star maps  _ his flatmate _ had drawn from memory while high one unusual day off, using the names of all his cousins as reference.

Among them was The Murderer’s own constellation, Canis Major, drawn in jagged straight lines with a penknife, the Dog Star itself marked with a tiny caricature of a pup with its tongue out.

“Can’t call you The Dog forever,” Remus mutters. “Not if he’s The Murderer, that’s just unfair to you…”

Remus glances at The Dog, whose tongue is lolled out almost the exact same way as the tiny picture, and sighs.. The Dog sighs in response and rolls over to look at Remus.

“How about Canis Major, you big galoot of a dog? Major, maybe, for short?”

Major gave another of his small, careful barks and licked Remus’s chest. With a small laugh, Remus swung his legs over the edge of the couch. “How about we go for that walk, Major? Huh?”

This time Major’s barks are loud and echoey, and Remus is reminded of a loud, room-filling laugh. Somehow, watching Major’s tail wag, that hurts less this time. Underneath the memory, there might even be joy.

 

 


	2. A Connection to All That is Real

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Remus realizes he might be more fucked-up than he wanted to admit.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I swear to god there is a third chapter to this story.
> 
> There are several PTSD flashbacks in this chapter but nothing violent.

As 9th December approaches, Remus becomes more attached to Major and more worried for what that means for him, his cardboard boxes, and his monthly foray into beasthood. He has never had a pet before, and has never wanted one. The others had been the best of both worlds, pets that came when you needed them and regained their opposable thumbs when you didn’t. Major is different. He’s dependent on Remus, who, having been dependent on others for much of his life, finds he rather enjoys the feeling of responsibility. 

It feels almost like playing house—here, you survived a war where all of your friends died, where your mother died, where your father hates you and you never did anything after leaving school but spy and sneak and fight. Now play papa to a dog and pretend everything is normal. We’ll call you back when your fantasy break is over.

But the only call he gets is from Ashley from Walworth.

“Hullo?” Remus picks up the phone with one hand and pulls on an old shirt turned dog toy with the other.

“Hi, Remus, it’s Ashley again!” Major, hearing her voice, attempts to bark around the knotted shirt and instead he drops it. Remus, suddenly released from his countering force, topples backwards into the counter with an _oof!_

“Major!” he chides gently. “Sorry, Ashley.”

She laughs that cheerful laugh of hers. “So he’s got a name?”

“Er…”

“Does this mean he’s also got a home?”

“Well, I—”

“Because I have a couple looking to adopt an older dog, and I thought your friend might be perfect.”

The floor drops out from underneath him and he feels rather faint. In all his thoughts about how to manage Major and the moon and life in general, he has somehow forgotten that there’s a possibility of someone else wanting his dog. And there’s the crux of the matter, isn’t it? Major feels like _his_ dog, and has ever since Remus patched up the bathroom door with some well-placed magic and cleaned the grout in the bathroom. The small flat had not gotten bigger on Halloween, but Remus had felt smaller inside of it, and Major was helping to fill all the extra space.

“Ashley, I think… I would like to adopt Major. Our friend. Officially.”

“Oh, good!” Ashley doesn’t sound surprised. “Because I told that couple our boy’d already been homed. I’m thankful you didn’t make a liar of me.” 

After that, it’s just a matter of paperwork. Ashley comes by the flat again so he doesn’t have to leave Major for too long, and as she leaves, he wonders if Major can be trusted alone for twelve hours or so, or if he’ll come back to a ransacked apartment.

Part of him wants to feel that this is the worst time he’s ever abandoned his everyday life for a transformation. In fact, it’s almost a yearning to pretend that this is true—that the worst thing he’s ever had to do in order to become a cannibalistic Dark creature in secret is to leave his dog alone overnight with some newspaper down for bathroom needs and three bowls of both water and food, just in case. If leaving Major is the worst, it means he can cleanse himself, a man being absolved of his past. Perhaps that’s the best plan: deliberate amnesia.

 _Or a memory charm,_ he muses absently as he packs a few healing potions into the charmed pocket of his canvas jacket. The idea occurs to him from elsewhere, as ideas do when one is otherwise occupied, but once he processes it, he freezes, hands gripping his coat. _It’s an option,_ he tells himself. He can go find someone. Caradoc could—well. No. Caradoc died and they never found the missing parts of his body. Benjy Fenwick? But Benjy was also dead. Maybe Molly Weasley. She lost both of her brothers, after all, and understands the heavy fog of grief…

He gives Major a good-night petting as the afternoon light turns golden. “I’ll be back soon,” he promises, distracted by thoughts of memory charms and absolution. “Be good for me, Padfoot.”

He’s Apparated, feet hitting the cobblestones in Hogsmeade, before he realizes his mistake. He tries to shrug it off, and takes a swig from a hip flask of Firewhiskey, which he’s begun to carry around to dull the amount of pain that seems to live just beneath his skin, to take the taste of the word out of his mouth.

Going back to the Shrieking Shack is risky, and incredibly painful, but it is reliable, and Remus doesn’t feel like risking complications his first moon away from Major. He doesn’t even bother dressing the next morning, just chugs some healing potion and a vial of Skele-Gro for a missing right toe. He’s eager to leave the Shack and return home as soon as he can. It’s easier to blame this on his dog than to think about what the dust in the walls remembers. He finds Major sleeping on the sofa, and he wakes up quickly when he sees Remus, tail wagging so hard his hindquarters switch back and forth as well.

“Good boy!” Remus says, dropping his clothing and wand beside the door and greeting Major enthusiastically despite his nakedness. He reckons if his dog can’t handle him nude, or vice versa, this hodge-podge situation won’t be much good anyway. Major barks and licks his face, forgiving Remus his absence. When Remus checks on things, he sees all Major’s business done neatly on last week’s _Daily Prophet_ , much to the disgust of the celebrity portraits inside the entertainment section, who are squashed against the sides of their photos and holding their noses. After giving Remus’s face a thorough tongue bath, Major moves on to the cuts and marks that the potions had not yet healed, nudging his nose against them and snuffling.

“It’s alright, boy, it’s fine.” Remus pushes his head away gently. “I’m fine.” 

Major keeps his cold, Knut-sized black nose an inch from Remus’s side but continues snuffling and giving soft, bothered growling until Remus finds a spot to scratch on his side that sends Major rolling over to show his belly and sighing a contented, doggy sigh.

“I told you I’d come back, yeah? Here I am. I promise, I will always come back.”

. . .

Life settles into a rhythm aside from the full moon. Major sleeps on the couch with Remus more often than he doesn’t. He adjusts to Remus’s restlessness that comes from chronic pain and stiffness, and is quick to differentiate it from the tension that accompanies the rising tide of nightmares. When faced with the latter, Major barks softly and nudges Remus with his nose until Remus wakes up, usually with a start and his heart beating fast and loud. Major lays with him until he feels Remus fall back to sleep, usually with the help of Firewhiskey or Butterbeer with an extra shot of something, and in the morning he looks happy to see his human, even if that human had woken ten times in the night. In return, Remus takes Major on walks and plays tug-of-war with tattered old jumpers turned into ropes and scratches him in his favorite spots.

It’s mid-December before Remus has a chance to even change his calendar from October to November. Other than his walks with Major and his two monthly furlongs into wolfishness, Remus has not left the apartment. He knows he needs to, knows the financial gifts that James and The Murderer had left him would be dwindling out of his Gringotts account like water from a leaky roof, but he cannot bring himself to do so. He listens to records, he re-reads favorite books, he falls asleep on the couch because the sheets still smell like _him._

The list of things he does not do is much longer, and it becomes a list of unwritten rules. Do not open the hall closet that smells like black leather. Do not play the punk records that are still in the cabinet. Do not use the laundry soap that makes your clothes smell like _his_. Do not listen to the Quidditch games on the radio, where James’s favorite team is playing. Do not eat anything spicy. Don’t smell spearmint, which Lily liked because she said it matched her eyes. Don’t light the small wood stove that serves as a Floo-way, because someone will call and for one fleeting, bright, soap-bubble moment he will think it’s them and when it isn’t, his heart will break all over again.

Above all, do not spend more time outside than necessary, just in case. Outside means red hair in crowds that makes him shiver, songs that make him think of drunken school nights in the Gryffindor tower, loud shouts from groups of teenagers that cause him to whirl around, tangled in Major’s leash, with a jinx on his lips before he realizes it’s just a group of Muggle kids on their way home from school. He realizes he is not only _in_ danger—as a werewolf, as an Order member, as the lover of the man who made the parents of the Boy Who Lived the Ones that Died—but _is_ a danger. He has, dozens of times, stopped himself from turning legs into jelly or body-binding old women by mere moments. His wand seems perpetually in his hand, and every noise makes him jump, look round, and anticipate an influx of skull-masked Death Eaters. They’re gone, scattered, being arrested in amazing numbers and sent to Azkaban like _he_ was, and yet Remus sees them around every corner, expects them at every alley, feels them following him as he walks Major under sodium-yellow lights between sections of too-black dark.

Eventually, just before Christmas, Remus runs out of food.

He’s been stopping at Muggle burger joints on walks and buying small cans of dog food at the corner store, both either late at night or just after dawn, when there are the fewest people, but he has to admit this is no longer working. The flat has been stocked with non-perishables for some time, because shopping was always done quickly and in bulk—who the fuck knows when you’ll come home and cook dinner during a war? And no one wants zucchini and chicken rotting in the fridge. But he’s worked methodically through bags of dry rice and boxes of pasta and even the bag of flour, and now there’s only generic black tea in those damned paper tea bags and some condiments in the refrigerator.

Food means trekking to the nearest market, which is a kilometer away. The Apparition there would be easy, but he’s never mastered getting all his groceries home the way _he_ had, and so Remus would have to walk the distance, and even casting Featherweight Charms on the paper sacks, he would have to deal with the walk home, without Major, listening to the cracking in his knees and moans of his back. The more he thinks about it, the more it seems an insurmountable effort; an impossible task. The weight of it sits on his shoulders and chest and drives him deeper into the lumpy cushions of the couch beneath the warm, solid weight of his dog.

Finally, on his second day of drinking tea and sugar and finishing the last sleeve of stale crackers from behind the toaster, he admits to himself he can no longer avoid the task.

Rather than Apparating to the shop, he decides to walk, despite his unshakable fatigue. He is afraid he will misjudge his destination and Splinch. He’s afraid he’ll pop into being in front of a clan of Muggle tourists with cameras. He’s afraid—well, of being out of his flat in general, truly, but being _magical_ outside of his flat especially. Magic puts a target on you, and it’s hard to differentiate Death Eaters from civilians or Order members in Muggle clothes in broad daylight. It is, in fact, apparently sometimes difficult to differentiate Order members and Death Eaters even when they’re _not_ in Muggle clothes, not in _any_ clothes, and they’re sprawled, laughing on your bed— 

He scratches Major vigorously and checks his food and water bowls three times before he leaves. “I’ll be back,” he promises, as he had before the last full moon. When he steps out of the flat, he gives his doorknob a hard twist and pulls, ensuring it’s locked. Frowning, he tries again, to be sure. He turns the knob left and yanks, turns it right and yanks again. The door does not open, but by the time he’s finished his check he is already afraid again. What if he wasn’t pulling hard enough? What if his previous test had knocked something loose?

Five minutes and a dozen knob wrenches later, he manages to pull away from the door, he casts a Disillusionment Charm, and as he walks down the building corridor, he glances back three times, just in case there’s something—or someone—at his back.

Remus walks to the shop, determined to keep moving and get back as soon as possible. He does what he can to keep himself calm. He has his wand up his sleeve and the handle is resting on his fingers. He counts the cracks on the sidewalk. He tries to remember all the verses to the lewd song about a Grindylow that Peter used to sing, but that hurts too much, and so he switches to trying to sing The Beatles’ _Revolver_ all the way through. He makes it two lines through “Tax Man” before it muddles to knots in his head. His thoughts can’t settle on one thing. He checks street signs for directions and tries to convince himself not to glance the way Alastor Moody taught him: ahead, up, down, over both shoulders, ahead again. It takes half an hour to reach the grocers’, and in that time he’s developed an anxious tension in his limbs, and his body is cold except for a profusion of sweat under his armpits and in his hair beneath his woolen hat.

When he opens the door to the shop, he is suddenly unable to breathe. _Stone-Lungs Jinx,_ he thinks, one hand flying to his throat and the other to his wand. The counter-jinx is hard to do wordlessly, and Remus wonders if he’ll be able to do it properly before blacking out— 

And then he realizes his shortness of breath is the heat in the annex, cranked up to the point of discomfort to counteract the constant breeze through the opening door.

 _Get ahold of yourself, Lupin,_ he chides silently, deliberately slipping his wand into the inner pocket of his coat and taking his fingers from its handle. He goes into the store proper, where the air is less stifling, and takes a shopping basket. _Bread, peanut butter, jam, flour, sugar, perhaps some apples, kibble for Major…_

He wants to be done quickly and home even more quickly, so he keeps his head down and tries to remember what he can about the store layout. He doesn’t like it, and he wants to be home so he can check on Major, but at least he’ll have food.

He’s picking up a carton of eggs and checking to see if any are broken when he hears the Apparition. There is a loud pop, and screams. He drops the carton of eggs and he really does mean to draw his wand, but despite the fact that he’s had it in his hand all day, he finds he cannot bring himself to pull it from his coat. Instead he drops towards the ground, basket forgotten, hands over his head even though he knows it will do nothing to block curses. He thinks perhaps they will assume he is a Muggle and leave him alone, and he wonders where James is, where Sirius us, why he hasn’t heard backup come yet— 

There is a hand on his shoulder and this time he really _would_ have drawn his wand, but he is trembling and he cannot reach properly into his coat while lying on his stomach.

“‘Ey, mate, can ye hear me? S’all right, kid, breathe, yer right here, yer in the shop, it was just a light bulb…”

A light bulb?

Remus realizes he cannot hear screaming, or Disapparition pops, or the whistle of spells. Instead, there is background murmuring and some bland, awful Muggle music. _The shop,_ he thinks. _I came into the shop._

Remus pushes himself up, hands slipping across something on the tile, and manages to sit upright. There is a man sitting close to him who is breathing roughly, as if perhaps he has a cough. He has a jumper on with a red poppy pin, something Remus vaguely associates with Muggle soldiers. 

“When did ye come home?” the old man asks.

“Home?” Remus repeats dumbly.

“From wherever ye was fightin’.”

Fight—oh. _Oh._ The man thinks he, Remus, is a Muggle soldier.

“No, I’m not—” he begins, and then catches sight of his own trembling hands and recalls his reactions over the past fifteen minutes. What was he going to say? Not a soldier? Because that is entirely untrue, and he knows it. Not a veteran? But isn’t that what you call soldiers whose wars have ended and left them behind? He glances at the old man, but the man is just looking vaguely in the direction of the store employee bringing out a large ladder, presumably to change the lightbulb.

“November,” Remus says finally. “I came home on first November.”

The old vet keeps his eyes pointedly away from Remus’s face, but Remus sees his eyebrows raise. “Well no wonder ye drop’ like that, it’s barely been weeks, ha’n it?”

“I suppose,” Remus agrees uncertainty. The old vet has a point, but the ~~fifty-one and a half days~~ seven weeks or so he’s lived since finding out that Lily and James had died have been the longest of his life. Remus thinks perhaps he should say something more on the matter, but before he can, he’s interrupted by a shadow falling over himself and the old man. 

“Are you alright?” asks a young man in a bright green vest—another store employee. “Did you hu— _hey!”_ he exclaims, brow furrowing, as he looks to something beside the Muggle veteran. “You can’t bring a _dog_ in here!”

 _Sirius!_ Remus’s heart exclaims, and he’s whipped his head around to look before he can help himself.

It is not Sirius. The dog in question, who has been sitting on the old man’s other side, is a calm, friendly-looking Golden Retriever with a dark blue harness. The harness has a logo and words stitched into it that are currently obscured by the old man’s leg.

“Excuse _me_ , young man,” the old man says, face serious. “But Tank is a service animal.”

“You ain’t blind!” the kid replies, looking more confused than angry,

“No I ain’t! And ye ain’t neither, apparently, but y’are disrespectful to yer elders!” The old man pushes himself up somewhat slowly to his feet and Remus notes, from his dazed and comfortable spot on the floor still, that Tank rises to their feet as well. “Tank’s the reason why I ain’t as laid up as my friend here!” He gestures loosely to Remus, who is still sitting on the floor among, he realizes, broken eggshells. “Now, we’re gonna purchase our goods an’ go, and yer gonna let us.” The old man holds a hand out to Remus, who takes it and allows himself to be led, dazedly, to the checkout with his half-finished grocery basket. He hands his food to the clerk methodically and digs the Muggle money out of his pocket. It isn’t until he’s back out through the over-warm entryway and in the chill that he realizes the old man is still walking beside him, carrying one of his paper sacks of groceries.

“I—listen, I’m so sorry, er—can I—?” Remus stammered nonsensically as he urged his brain back on.

“‘S nothin’, soldier,” the man said, giving Remus a clap on the shoulder. “Think ye can get home safe?”

Remus nodded and gave the old vet a firm handshake, or at least as firm as he could do with adrenaline-trembling hands around a grocery bag. He set off for home, focusing on the weight of the grocery bags and the thought of Major waiting at home.

. . .

It takes Remus an embarrassing three days to fully unpack the paper sacks of food, and when he does, he finally finds the pamphlet. The old veteran must have left it for him, although whether that was on purpose or not was hard to say. There was something incredibly depressing about being given advice about one’s mental state by an elderly soldier. 

The pamphlet front cover says, “Service Dogs Lead from the Heart!” and features a quote on most of the space.

__

> _He [my service dog] allows me to function in situations that are otherwise difficult. I respect his skills, his loyalty and know every nuance of his special and complex personality. He is my friend, my family and my connection to all that is good. Please recognize him, not as a dog, but as an essential part of my life and well-being._

_My connection to all that is good,_ he thinks, and the familiar wrenching feeling in his chest twists up as he glances over at Major, asleep on the armchair, but thinks of The Man. He leafs through the rest of the pamphlet, convinced at first that he will simply toss it in the bin with the receipt. Instead, he props it up against the coffee pot, to look at later.

. . .

It happens two weeks later. His trip to the store has somewhat bolstered his courage, and he’s begun taking longer walks with Major, taking turns down streets he’s never seen before. Partly this is for Major, but he keeps his eye out for _Help Wanted_ signs, painfully aware that he’ll be getting owls from Gringotts any day now, and that Muggle money is better than no money, and doesn’t come with the same anti-werewolf sentiment. This is how he ends up passing the Indian food place at lunchtime, the smell of vindaloo and naan swirling around him as someone shoulders open the door.

Suddenly he is in the Potters’ kitchen, laughing. Peter has flour in his hair and James and Sirius are wrestling for control of the spatula while Euphemia laughs near the stove. He can feel the heat of the oven and the knows it’s midsummer, a blessed space between full moons where there’s nothing but sunlight, nothing but gladness, nothing but the way his heart swells— 

There is an insistent nudging at his knee and he reaches down for Major’s muzzle automatically before he comes back to himself. He cannot breathe, there are hot tears sliding down his crooked nose. He has gone _tharn_ on the sidewalk, frozen in place, other noon-time pedestrians giving him a wide berth and strange looks. The memory whispers behind him, threatening to overtake him, but he winds Major’s lead so tightly around his hand that it makes his fingers throb, and Major’s fur is rough and real against his other hand.

“‘M here, boy,” Remus mumbles, forcing himself to take steadier breaths, to put one foot in front of the other until they are past the smell of cilantro and chili peppers and cumin. There are still tears streaking down his face. Major doesn’t seem to mind.

They take an alternate route home. Remus picks up the pamphlet the old soldier had left him and reads it three times before he tries his hand at transfiguring a spare lead into a blue harness with white writing. _Service dog,_ it says along the sides. _Do not pet,_ it declares across the back.

It takes a few tries to coax Major into it, and to add buckles and straps Remus hadn’t conjured correctly, but once it’s on, Major shakes himself off and sits down, waiting for the next thing. He doesn’t chew it or try to pull it off. Remus gives him a spoonful of peanut butter as a reward, and Major spends the next hour licking it out of the spaces between his teeth.

“Good boy, Major,” Remus tells him. “So good.”

Other than the nights of the full moon, Remus never leaves the house without his dog again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [This](http://veterantraveler.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/SD-Brochure-Final-2.pdf) is the service dog pamphlet I used for reference. I know it’s US-based and also more modern than what Remus was looking at, but I couldn’t find a lot of literature from UK at the time.
> 
> No beta because I am too angsty for all my friends, hmu if you caught errors
> 
> You can find me [on Twitter](http://twitter.com/crashmargulies_)


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